"The Spear"

◇ ◆ ◇

Agan had been awake for an hour when the horns came.

He lay in the corner where the wall met the floor, in the coldest part of the East barracks, listening to a hundred and fifty-three strangers breathe. The corner was the safest place in a room full of people who had already decided what he was. His back to stone. Nothing behind him. He had learned that in a compound where the walls had ears and the ears kept prices.

A small, solid young woman was beside him.

She was a Forest girl who had come in last, after the lamps were down, and taken the last space, which was the one next to his because no one else had wanted the corner either. She had not said a word. Her arakniga, a spider‑beast that could swell into a ridable giant when needed, lay curled, dark and compact against her chest with its legs tucked beneath it, and she slept with one hand over it as one keeps a hand on an akobi‑purse in a strange town. She and Agan had not spoken. They had lain two arm's-lengths apart in the dark, and the way she held her silence had matched the way he held his, and that had been enough to sleep beside.

He had not slept much. He had spent the dark hours the way he spent all his dark hours now---going back over a thing and taking it apart to see how it worked.

The Delta girl. The one the salt had sent to the Eye.

He ran his thumb along the outer edge of his own palm in the dark, below the smallest finger, where her arm had been for one heartbeat before she tore it free. He could still find the place. He did not know why he kept finding it.

She had said three words to him and then two more and then one, and every one of them had been correct, and he had deserved most of them. That was not the part he could not put down. He had been cut before. He was a compound heir; he had been cut by experts.

The part he could not put down was that she had not looked back.

She had said her piece and turned and walked into the Eye's half of the Yard and never once---not at the edge of it, not at the turn of it---looked back to see whether any of it had landed. A person checked. Even his father checked, a flick of the eyes to weigh the blow. She had not checked. She had said the true cruel thing, spent nothing more on him, not even the cost of a backward glance, and gone on with her morning while he spent the whole night on hers.

The horns came up through the floor.

The arakniga girl beside him woke without a start, eyes open and clear before the sound had finished. She reached for her pack in one motion, pulled out a thin frame of clear stone set into dark metal, and tied the ropes behind her curly hair with the efficiency of someone who'd done it her entire life.

She sat up.

Agan sat up.

Two people who had not introduced themselves, rising in the same beat like they had drilled it, and the beast uncurled against her chest and she stood and he stood and they walked out into the grey together with no word passing between them.

◇ ◆ ◇

The charging grounds were the East's, and the East did not hold anything.

The Obi told them so in the first breath. Savanna, old, his legs a country of old scars, and he walked the front of the grounds on them like each step was a debt he paid out of spite.

"The Wall holds. You are not the Wall. You are the Spear. The Spear goes first and goes hardest and does not wait to be hit. You hit. If you are ever standing still on this ground, you have already lost---and so has the one the enemy comes through you to reach." He did not raise his voice.

Deka stood at the front of it like he had been born there. He had the Mountain cluster gathered loose around him without seeming to have gathered them, and he governed the grounds already, before anyone had made him anything.

They drilled Forest weapons that morning. Machete, hand-axe, the curved short blades the canopy-fighters used at close range. Agan drew a training spear off the rack---dark-hafted, blunted, longer than his arm and then some. It was not his own weapon; the Mountain fought short-spear-and-shield, close and covered. But his father had made sure he could hold anything with a haft.

He watched the pairs form. He watched who chose whom. That was the tell in any space---not who fought, but who picked their fights, and how. The beasts were stabled at the ground's edge during sparring---no bonded creature at a rider's side, no unfair advantage. The Obi's rule. The arakniga girl's beast was in the pen with the others, a small dark shape among the larger war-beasts, its legs tucked beneath it.

Osigi, a Forest boy, picked the arakniga girl.

He was one of Deka's. A broad boy with a machete he wore like he had used it on more than posts, and he looked at the arakniga girl the way Deka had looked at Agan on the road: a thing already beneath him. A small, silent beast the size of a dog. Easy.

They squared off.

The Obi watched from the side and said nothing, because the Spear does not wait to be hit, and a trainee who cannot survive a spar cannot survive a breach.

It went wrong fast.

Osigi did not spar. He came at her the way one comes at a thing one means to put down. Too fast. Too heavy. The machete moved at real speed with no pulled edge, and the arakniga girl gave ground, and gave more, quick and small and reading him in her stone-eyes---but reading a thing does not stop it if the thing is bigger and does not care. He got inside her guard. He knocked the training blade out of her hand. It skittered across the salt.

Her arakniga swelled and growled inside the pen where the other riders kept their beasts, trapped. It could not reach its bonded rider, who instead went for the small knife at her belt alone---a move that told Agan something he did not have time to understand.

Osigi kicked her legs out. She went down. The machete came up high, and it started down for real---

Agan was already moving.

He did not think about it. His feet had gone before the rest of him. The spear was longer than the machete by half again, and that was the whole of it---he did not have to be faster than Osigi, only to reach further, and he did. The haft caught the machete's arc a hand above the girl's head and turned it wide. The blade bit salt instead of girl.

Then he put the blunt point into Osigi's gut, one thrust, controlled, all the reach and none of the wildness, and the boy folded around it and sat down hard.

"Stay down," Agan said.

Osigi did not stay down. He got a knee under himself.

And then, from the side---from where Deka stood with his arms crossed---a hand went flat to the salt and came up full, and Agan understood a half-heartbeat too late.

The world went white, and then the salt began to grind and hurt his eyes.

He heard someone laugh. Deka. Deka's hand, Deka's salt; he would put that together later. Now there was only the grinding in his eyes and the water starting out of them and no way to see, and he staggered back off his own drill space with his spear up and one hand over his face, blind.

The East ground ran alongside the Eye's; he had marked it at the morning's muster, two drill squares butting edges with nothing between them but a line of salt. He crossed it without knowing. One step, two, and then he hit someone and went half-down with them, catching himself on one hand in the salt, eyes streaming, the world a smear of white light and water.

"Off." A hand shoved him. He knew the voice. Salt-blind, eyes running, he knew it. He had spent a night taking it apart. "Get off."

He got off. He knelt in the salt with the heels of his hands to his streaming eyes and got a breath.

"Twice." Her voice, above him, flat and certain. "Two days. Two times you've put your body into mine because you can't keep it in the space you were given." A pause. "Is that a Mountain thing---taking up ground that isn't yours. Or is it just you."

His eyes were clearing, the salt washing out on its own tears, and he could see her in pieces: the marks down her arms, the dark set of her face, the way she stood over him like a thing that had spilled. She was not surprised. She had known him the second he hit her. She had decided everything about him a night and a collision ago---all of it, the whole verdict, on what he was and not one thing he had done.

"I don't want anything from you." His voice came out level. The salt burned. He kept it level anyway; level was the one weapon he had never been disarmed of.

"Good. Keep it that way."

She turned to go. And because she was turning, because she was already spending nothing more on him, the thing came up out of him sideways, as things did when he could not say the true one.

"You didn't make a sound."

She stopped. Not all the way. Half.

"At the stone. Yesterday." He was on his feet now, blinking her into focus. "Everyone made a sound. The whole circle screamed or wept or begged. You put your hands on it and you stood there and you didn't make a sound, and then you walked to the water like you'd been told the answer seasons ago." He had not meant to know that. He had not meant to have watched that closely. It was out now. "I know you're cruel. I watched you be cruel to me twice. But you weren't that quiet because you're cruel."

Her jaw set. When she spoke it was lower, and worse.

"You're Mountain. Your people go into the ground and dig up the dead and cut them into money. You wear it around your neck." Her eyes went to the empty cord at his throat, and came back up.. "Don't tell me what I am. You don't get to tell me what anything is. Your people's way of life is built on people who look like mine---worked until they were debts, and then worked until they were rutting beads."

"I know what my people do." Quiet.

"Then you know to stay out of my way."

"I know why you think you don't want it." He heard himself say it, salt in his eyes, the two of them a hand apart in the middle of a war camp. "That's not the same thing."

She looked at him one more heartbeat and decided it was not worth it.

"You won't let anyone know me," he said, quiet, as she was already turning.

She did not answer. She walked back into the Eye's ground and did not look back, and he stood there with the salt still burning and watched her not look back.

"Salt in the eyes." The Obi's voice came across the grounds, dry, aimed nowhere and at exactly one person. "Old Wall trick. A coward's." He let his gaze rest on Deka a beat too long. "Do it on my ground again and you spar me."

Deka's face didn't change. He didn't look at the Obi, or at Agan. He looked at the spear-drill in front of him like it was the only thing in the Yard worth his attention, and the cluster around him closed tighter, and the morning went on.

◇ ◆ ◇

A small hand closed on Agan's arm.

It was the arakniga girl. She did not say anything. She pulled, and he went, because his eyes were on fire and she was the only person in the yard moving toward him instead of away, and she walked him off the grounds and around the barracks to an overturned water-trough in its shadow and sat him on it.

She pushed her waterskin into his hands. "Wash your eyes."

He tipped his head back and poured. The salt came out in a flood of stinging water, the fire banked, and the world came back in wet pieces---the red wall, the grey sky, the small dark shape of the girl wearing stone-eyes, standing over him with her arms crossed.

"Thank you," he said.

She shook her head. "You stepped in front of a machete."

"He was going to hit you."

"I know." She said it without weight. "That's why I'm thanking you. You stepped in front of a machete. No one steps in front of things for me."

"You're welcome."

"You're welcome." A pause. "For the water."

"I thanked you for the water."

"I know. I'm thanking you for thanking me. You'd be surprised how many people take a thing and don't. So. Thank you. For thanking me."

His eyes cleared in the grey daylight. She was rewrapping her beast against her shoulder, the small spider settling into the silk with its legs folding under it, and as she worked, she turned her head to check the grounds, and the light off the salt hit the stones in her frame and held---held perfectly, no waver, no bubble, no swim at the rim. He knew cut stone; his family had cut it for six generations, sold clarity by weight. He knew a Mountain clear stone always wavered. There was always a bubble in it somewhere, a place where the world bent unnaturally. Hers did not bend. He looked through the edge of the light coming off it and the world stayed straight all the way to the rim.

That clarity was not possible.

"What is that," he said. He kept his eyes off her face and on his own hands, on the waterskin. She was still working the silk around her beast, and he asked it like it was nothing. "The stone."

She did not look up from the beast. "It's so I can see."

"I know what it's for." He turned the skin in his hands. "I'm asking what it is. I've never seen stone hold clear like that."

Her hands kept working the silk. A pause.

"The Forest calls it otodu. I think your people call it akorite. It comes out of the deep floor, under the old canopy, where the light hasn't reached the ground in a thousand seasons. You can't mine it. It's not in veins. It's just there, sometimes, in the dark---if your family has walked the same grove long enough to know where to put their hands." She tied off the silk. "Mine has."

He turned that over. She was compound-raised. He could do the sum without being handed the numbers. A stone clearer than any Mountain stone, that could not be mined, that came only to families who had guarded one grove across a hundred generations---she was wearing more on her face than the second compound of Okot would move through its ledgers in a season. A fortune on the bridge of her nose. And she was the girl Osigi had picked because she was small and quiet and nobody worth the trouble, the girl the whole Yard had already decided was beneath the looking.

He did not say any of it. He looked at his hands.

"Where does your family---"

"We don't talk about the grove," she said. "You've got salt in your collar."

He let it go.

She let him finish the water. Then she sat down beside him on the trough, her beast between them, and looked out at the grounds, where Deka had the cluster running spear-drills now, clean and sharp, a boy building a thing.

"He's going to win the Gambit," she said.

Agan said nothing.

"The Spear's captaincy. It's by the end of the moon." She read it out like a track in dust. "Everyone knows it already. Best rider in the cadre, the blood, half the Mountain lot trailing him, and the Obi likes a winner. He'll be Pashi and you'll be under him, and you, Agan, will spend two seasons finding out how much salt a person can eat." She tilted her head. "Unless you're better than him by the end of the moon. Which you're not. Not with a spear."

Of course, she knew his name.

Agan was silent for a moment.

"You have a suggestion?" He looked at her, gaze holding a beat longer than the question---an expectant tilt of his head.

She smiled. "My name is Njira. And yes... one." She nodded north, at nothing he could see. "The Canyon boy. Sat by the shields at the Sorting. They're saying he's a skein---carries the beast inside him, in the scar, and it comes out in threads. They're saying he's already the best fighter in the Gate and he hasn't lifted a real weapon yet." Camp gossip, and she said it like camp gossip. "If anyone could teach you to fight above your weight, it's a thing that fights above every weight there is."

Agan did not say they're saying. He had not heard it secondhand. He had stood eight feet from the Canyon boy when the salt took him, close enough to feel it-the seam coming open, the dark pouring out, the sound torn out of him from somewhere lower than a throat should reach, and the cold of it going straight through Agan's own chest where there was nothing at all. He had not been told about the threads. He had watched them reach.

"I've seen it," he said. "It's not gossip."

Njira looked at him a moment, recalibrating---she was always recalibrating, he was learning, always adjusting the map as new ground came in. "Then you know I'm right. We find him. We convince him. We have until the end of the moon."

"People like that don't take students."

"People like you don't have friends either," Njira said. "And here you are, talking to one." She stood, gathered her beast, looked down at him through the impossible clear stones. "We'll find him. Not today---you look like salt, and I already saved your life once. Rest on it."

She paused, turned, and offered a small, tentative grin---shy, quick, eyes darting away almost shyly---then went, her arakniga still tucked against her shoulder.

Agan sat on the trough after she left. The waterskin was empty. The salt was still a faint burn at the corners of his eyes. He turned her proposal over---we find him, we convince him---and it was not a bad plan, and he had no better one, and he had spent three seasons of his life learning that survival was a thing you did with other people or not at all. He had not expected the other person to be a Forest girl with stones in her face and a spider on her shoulder. But the Yard did not give you what you expected. The Yard gave you what was left after everything else had been taken, and what was left, this morning, was Njira.

◇ ◆ ◇

The drills ran on, and the day wore down toward Third horn.

Once, crossing between grounds, Agan looked across the Yard to the Eye's ground.

She was there, in the middle of her cadre's work, standing with that stillness she carried---the one he had marked the first night and could not stop marking---like she was listening to something under the salt the rest of them couldn't hear. He looked at her across two hundred bodies and the whole width of the Yard. She did not look back. She did not know he was looking. Or she knew, and it cost her nothing to ignore.

Either way, she went on with her cadre's work and did not turn her head.

Once, her hand went to her wrist. Pressed it. He had seen her do that at the wall the first night. He did not know what it meant. He did not know if it meant anything. He found himself curious, and the curiosity had no direction and no outlet, and he did not know what to do with it.

He had been hated his whole life. He knew where to stand in hatred. He did not know where to stand in this.

He looked away first, because he was the only one who could, and went back to the spear.

◇ ◆ ◇

He lay in the corner in the dark and did not sleep.

His hand had gone to his own chest. Flat, over the sternum. The cord was gone. The bead was sealed into the salt at the spear's foot, and his chest was bare, and the cold that sat over his sternum was not the cold of the Nest and not the cold of the salt. It was the cold of nothing at all. Under his palm, under the skin, there was no scar. There never had been.

And there was a boy across the north of the camp with a seam down his whole front that opened into the dark, and a girl in the Eye's barracks with thirty-seven debts written on her body, and both of them wore what they were on the outside where it could be read, and he wore nothing, and could be read as nothing, and was.

He went back over her words.

He took them apart to see how they worked, and hers came apart cleanly, every piece of it accurate. Mountain. Dig up the dead. Sell them. Wear it around your neck. She had looked at where the bead was suppose to be when she said it. As if she had known exactly what it was and exactly what it cost and exactly whose breath had gone into the making of it, and she had not been wrong about one word.

He held all of it. The accuracy of her contempt. The way she'd looked at the bead when she said wear it around your neck. The press of her thumb to her wrist that he could not read and could not stop watching.

Beside him, Njira breathed slow and even, her arakniga a small dark weight against her.

His hand went to his chest out of habit---to the cord, to the bead---and found nothing. The bead was sealed into the salt at the spear's foot, where he had left it. He had worn it every day since his mother pressed it into his palm at the Gate of Ancestors, and now it was gone, and the place where it had lain was bare. Under the bare place, under the skin, there was no scar. There never had been. He held his hand there anyway, and did not sleep for a long time, and when he did, he did not move the hand.